Ask a Question
or
Create a Poll
  1. Home /
  2. Questions /
  3. Education And Learning
  4. / Education Subjects
  5. / English Grammar
  6. / Grammar Usage And Syntax

by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

Drublic

Question

Help answer this question below.

What is the origin of upper and lower case J (Jj) in the English language?

  • Like
  • Report
Share:
Other

Answers. Showing one answer.

  • by canadianhelper on February 13th, 2007

    canadianhelper

    J was originally an alternate version of I. There was an emerging distinctive use in Middle High German.[1] Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds.[citation needed] Originally, both I and J represented /i/, /i?/, and /j/; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and /g/) that came to be represented as I and J; therefore, English J (from French J) has a sound value quite different from /i/.

    All the Germanic languages except English use J for /j/. This is also true of Hungarian, Albanian, Finnish, and Estonian. Further, those Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet (or adopted J into the Cyrillic, as in Serbian) use this letter for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the minuscule letter was chosen by IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.

    Linguists from Germany and Central Europe also took up this letter in transliterations from those Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet. Specifically, the "?" in Russian is sometimes transliterated "je" (with the "?" becoming "jo"); the "?" is transliterated as "ja"; and the character "?" is transliterated "ju" - whereas the linguists from America and the English speaking world use "y" in place of "j" because of English and Spanish use of Y for /j/. European linguists also use this for the character ? so that their transliterations of nominative case of adjectives ("-IJ") end in "-ij" whereas in American transliterations it's "-ii". The student who uses the American transliteration has to remember that the second "i" is different from the first in the original.

    Source: Wiki
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J

    Comments

    No comments. Post one | Permalink

Want to attach an image to your answer? Click here.

Did this answer your question? If not, then ask a new question or create a poll.

More Questions. Additional questions in this category.

You're reading What is the origin of upper and lower case J (Jj) in the English language?

Follow us on Facebook!

Related Ads

Related Questions

Professionally Researched

Answerbag

a Demand Media company